1. Field of the Invention
The embodiments disclosed herein relate to integrated circuit design and, more particularly, to a method, system and program storage device that, based on customer-specified design parameters for an integrated circuit, including operating temperature and expected life-time, automatically selects between two different electromigration violation thresholds for a short metal component and, subsequently, uses the selected electromigration violation threshold as a design constraint for the metal component during a design flow.
2. Description of the Related Art
Those skilled in the art will recognize that there are various failure mechanisms, which are associated with different classes of devices and/or with metal components of an integrated circuit (e.g., nets, local-interconnects, pads, vias, etc.) and which can cause the performance of integrated circuit to degrade over time. One such failure mechanism is electromigration. Electromigration is a condition in which atoms of a metal component are displaced due to the current passing through that metal component. Over time this metal atom displacement can cause cracks (i.e., voids, opens, etc.) in the metal component and can result in either increased resistance or failure. Since electromigration is caused by the collision between electrons and metal ions as direct current passes through the metal component, it is significant at relatively high direct current densities (i.e., when the ratio of direct current flow to unit area of cross-section is relatively high) and it is accelerated at relatively high temperatures. Consequently, as integrated circuit feature sizes decrease resulting in a corresponding increase in current density and as integrated circuit operating temperatures and expected lifetimes (i.e., power-on-hours (POH)) also increase at each new technology node, failures due to electromigration have become a major concern for integrated circuit designers.